Mac the Ripper is a little program that allows you to copy a DVD to your computer, and at the same time it removes the copy protection. (This is called ‘ripping’ a DVD). This allows you for example to then copy it to a Macbook Air (that has no DVD drive) to watch, or you can take the extra step of converting it to a Quicktime movie so you can put it on an iPad or even into a Keynote presentation. Continue reading 〉

The new OSX Lion comes as an upgrade from the Apple App Store – not on a DVD. The good news is that once you’ve paid for it once, Apple allow you to install it on all the computers you own for free! After you purchase it from the App Store you just have to go into the App Store on your other computers and Lion will be there – all paid for and ready to download again!

If you’ve tried watching DVD’s on your laptop (eg on a plane or in the car) you’ll notice the batteries wear down pretty quickly. Here’s how to copy your DVD onto your laptop, which you can do at home, so when you take your laptop on the road you don’t need to take the original disk, and so the batteries on your laptop will last longer.

Apple’s way (Time Machine) is a lot simpler. It’s automatic. It doesn’t rely on you remembering to do anything. The big disadvantage is that the backup is not bootable. So if your computer crashes you need to insert the original DVD and restore from the Time Machine backup. This process can take hours – not good if you are just heading out the door and need a file. But it will get your computer back to what it was like the hour before it crashed!

The second method takes a few steps longer to set up, but your backup will be bootable. That means if you plug your backup drive in, and then hold down Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup, you can boot instantly off your backup drive. In an emergency you can plug in your backup and be running from it under a minute. You can’t do this with Time Machine. The downside it it will only take you back to THE LAST TIME YOU BACKED UP.

I do both. I have time-machine running so my most recent work is always backed up, and I do a CCC backup monthly so I have an instant bootable backup ready to go for emergencies.

This article describes how to manually backing up using Super Duper. If you want to use Time Machine as well, here’s an article on how to backup using time-machine.

I’ve had a few people ask me how I did the screen casts for Dragon Dictate. I used a program called iShowU HD. It costs $29 and you can get it from here. You can also use it to turn a keynote presentation into a Quicktime movie and avoid the sync problems of Keynote’s built in export movie command. Continue reading 〉

I have a lot of .mov files. Each file is about 1 hour of movie footage but compressed to only 200-300MB. When I import them into iMovie it tries to convert them to dv files. Do you know a way to burn a collection of .mov files to a dvd so that they can be read with a normal dvd player?

Good question, let me explain a little bit about what you can and can’t do with CDs and DVDs.Continue reading 〉